Nudo allo specchio con cagnolino 1955

This is Felice Casorati's "Nude in front of the mirror with puppy," and I can only imagine what it was like for him to build this scene, layer by layer. He’s got the nude, front and back, and the reflected painting behind—not to mention the sweet puppy looking up. I wonder if the dog was well-behaved? Casorati's got this cool, crisp way of rendering the forms, but I'm drawn to how the reflection seems to break apart that crispness. In the mirror, you can sense how the nude sort of melts back into a cloud of colour and light. It’s like the difference between the thing itself and its fleeting, imagined possibility. The paint here is smooth and deliberate. I can see echoes of Italian Renaissance art. The clean lines and classical references are very strong, but he’s also part of a conversation with modernism. In that sense, he’s like other Italian painters, such as de Chirico, who play with a sense of displacement.